With serial killers, vampires and ghouls, Stephen King has kept us
reading for 30 years. Tim Martin champions a storyteller who never loses
sight of the humans at the heart of his horrors.

Stephen King likes to tease his readers with the prospect of retirement but, at 63, he only seems to be speeding up. This summer, America’s most enduring popular novelist celebrated seven years as a columnist with Entertainment Weekly: this autumn, he launches both a new comics collaboration with the writer Scott Snyder, American Vampire, and a new collection of novellas, Full Dark, No Stars, an unfashionable literary form with which he has traditionally enjoyed greater than usual success. He also recently announced that he is writing a sequel to his classic novel The Shining, suggesting strong resistance from whatever shadowy muse lurks in his mental basement to any attempt at handing in the pen.

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King

Full Dark, No Stars isn’t King’s best work, but of course, many or most of his readers will read it whether he’s on form or not. Like Woody Allen films for some and Bob Dylan albums for others, one buys them because there’s usually a flicker of genius somewhere and, if not, it’s worth supporting him until it comes back.

Brand loyalists of this kind are the “Constant Readers” whom King addresses in his ironic and distantly ghoulish forewords and afterwords — such as the one in his collection of stories Just After Sunset (2008), in which Uncle Stevie cheerfully suggests that a lunatic with a knife might this very minute be slipping through your unlocked back door. Being a Constant Reader, however, can be a fairly serious commitment. Full Dark is King’s 55th book, if you count non-fiction and essays: but that excludes, inter alia, the story he wrote to promote the Amazon Kindle, an abortive serial novel he published on his website, a coffee-table book, several comics projects and a collection he self-published at the age of 13.

What keeps us reading? One answer is habit; another is that this writer rarely disappoints in matters of structure. Almost all his novels are lessons in scenic form, and at the occasional moments when the stories take a sidestep into absurdity or the author gets lost in his own folky trouvailles, the pure form of the novel is usually sufficient to keep you reading. Form, for King, begins at a very basic level: it consists of hooking one paragraph into another and one chapter into the next. This writer came out of suspense novelism and if he has anything to do with it, you sense, the reader will never forget it.

Another of the prime pleasures of reading King is his ear for language. You can pinpoint the scripts he wrote for Scott Snyder’s American Vampire not by the story itself but by the darkly comic strand of Americana that creeps into the speech bubbles. In King’s scripts, people are described as “drowning like polecats in a plugged-up privy”, panicked dogs rush down the street going “Ike-Ike-Ike” and Skinner Sweet, the daywalking American vampire of the title, intersperses his howls for blood and vengeance with demands for CANDY. Even when there are serious points to make — particularly then, in fact — he does so with this kind of relish.

And from language, King builds character. This is the real reason that his readership stretches from adolescent boys to great-grandmothers, and incorporates people who otherwise wouldn’t touch anything under the Horror shelfmark: it also explains why, almost uniquely even among writers of speculative fiction, King gets to do pretty much whatever he likes and still sell. He’s written prison dramas, coming-of-age tales, police procedurals, sports stories and how-to-write manuals: he’s also written alien-invasion fables, straight-up dystopian sci-fi, Lovecraftian pastiches and innumerable variations on the staples of horror fiction: serial killers, vampires and things that go bump in the night. Depending on which book you pick up first, you may find a writer who’s channeling the great masters of American crime fiction or a man whose prime motivation, like the fat boy in The Pickwick Papers, is that “I wants to make your flesh creep.” But at the centre of all of these books is a writer who never loses sight of the humans, not unlike Constant Reader him-or-herself, trapped at the heart of his horrors. “Bad writing,” as he observes in the afterword to this latest collection of stories, “usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do.”

Those not already converted to this writer’s more ghoulish tendencies, though, will find little to change their minds in the opening tale of Full Dark, No Stars. “1922” is an overheated period piece that invokes the baroque bloodthirstiness of Poe and the grim, psychotic fictions of Jim Thompson. In it, Wilfred James, a Nebraska homesteader, connives with his son to slaughter his nagging wife over a land deal: but dumping the body down a well and hushing things up with the sheriff are only the beginning. Soon rats begin to stream from the corpse and cling onto the livestock, Wilf’s son runs away to become a bank robber, the bank forecloses on its mortgage and events spiral towards a gleefully foul conclusion.

“1922” is King playing to the gallery, a piece of dedicated Grand Guignol that embraces the conventions of the genre with relish. The murderer’s confession has been a creaky narrative device in horror fiction since Poe, and forcing it to the conclusion King does here — in which the protagonist dies a ghastly death while continuing to set

words

down on

PAPER!…

— is the kind of egregious pulp-fictional device that hardly anyone else would get away with these days. Whether readers get on with it or not will depend on their tolerance for this kind of Tales from the Cryptery. This particular reader wondered how long the story had been hanging around in the bottom drawer: much of it reads like work from far earlier in King’s career, in which authorial hand-rubbing and the exuberant distribution of tomato ketchup compensate for a story that is distinctly thin around the edges.

Narrative assurance is not the problem in “Fair Extension”, the kind of sour morality tale that might have done well as a Twilight Zone episode back in the day. A bank manager dying of cancer finds a roadside stall staffed by a Mr Elvid (oh, the complexity), who proposes a classic bargain: 15 extra years on earth as long as the sufferer fingers someone else for his misfortune. The bank manager nominates his successful best friend, then enjoys a ringside seat as his own cancer recedes and the scapegoat’s life crumbles. King could probably write this kind of story in his sleep by now, and he creditably stuffs it with the savoury morsels of American speech and the moments of smalltown detail that have become his stocks in trade: but, apart from a slightly bleaker strain of irony than these stories usually contain, there’s little else on offer here.

The collection really gets interesting with “Big Driver” and “A Good Marriage”, the only stories here without a touch of the supernatural. In “Big Driver”, a successful writer of mystery stories is captured on her way home from a reading by the local murderer, but survives a particularly horrifying rape, crawls out of the pipe where he dumps her and later exacts revenge. “Big Driver” tells a story that is by no means unknown to popular culture — King, indeed, has his protagonist watch DVDs of The Brave One and Last House on the Left as she mulls her retribution — but it insists on replacing the dubious ethical satisfactions of revenge cinema with a tone of studied pragmatism, and using the materials of violent entertainment and suspense fiction to tell a deeply non-entertaining story of suffering and dread. It’s not easy to read, but it is worth it.

As is “A Good Marriage”, the collection’s intriguing final story, in which a woman discovers that her impeccably mundane husband of 25 years is not the lawnmowing, golfing numismatist that he claims to be but a serial killer of unmatched viciousness and cunning. Like the other stories here, this one springs from an old idea (in this case, as old as Bluebeard) in an unexpected direction: for once, the story doesn’t end in a frantic chase once the killer finds out the truth, but with some far more troubling and resonant points about justice and forgiveness. King’s most striking effects have traditionally come when he rebels against the traditions of genre, but sometimes he just likes to have fun. In this collection, never less than entertaining, he does both.

Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King is published by Hodder and Stoughton for £18.99 T £16.99 0844 871 1515

American Vampire by Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque and Stephen King is published by Titan Books for £18.99